{"id":6313,"date":"2015-09-15T09:57:22","date_gmt":"2015-09-15T15:57:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/?p=6313"},"modified":"2015-12-02T08:53:14","modified_gmt":"2015-12-02T15:53:14","slug":"in-the-kingdom-of-the-bored-the-one-armed-bandit-is-king","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/?p=6313","title":{"rendered":"In the kingdom of the bored, the one-armed bandit is king"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"interface\"<\/a><\/p>\n

It still feels a little shameful to admit to the fact, but what engages us more and more is not the content but the mechanism.\u00a0Kenneth Goldsmith, in a Los Angeles Review of Books<\/em> essay,\u00a0writes<\/a>\u00a0of a\u00a0recent day when\u00a0he felt an urge\u00a0to listen to some music\u00a0by\u00a0the American composer Morton Feldman:<\/p>\n

I dug into my MP3 drive, found my Feldman folder and opened it up. Amongst the various folders in the directory was one labeled \u201cThe Complete Works of Morton Feldman.\u201d I was surprised to see it there; I didn\u2019t remember downloading it. Curious, I looked at its date \u2014 2009 \u2014 and realized that I must\u2019ve grabbed it during the heyday of MP3 sharity blogs. I opened it to find 79 albums as\u00a0zipped\u00a0files. I unzipped three of them, listened to part of one, and closed the folder. I haven\u2019t opened it since.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The pleasure of\u00a0listening to music was not as great as he anticipated. He found more pleasure in manipulating music files.<\/p>\n

Our role as librarians and archivists has outpaced our role as cultural consumers. Engaging with media in a traditional sense is often the last thing we do. … In the digital ecosystem, the apparatuses surrounding the artifact are more engaging than the artifact itself. Management (acquisition, distribution, archiving, filing, redundancy) is the cultural artifact\u2019s new content. …\u00a0In an unanticipated twist to John Perry Barlow\u2019s 1994 prediction that in the digital age we\u2019d be able to enjoy wine without the bottles, we\u2019ve now come to prefer the bottles to the wine.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It’s as though we find ourselves, suddenly, in a vast library, an infinite library, a library of Borgesian proportions, and we discover that what’s of most interest to us is not the books on the shelves but the intricacies of the Dewey Decimal System.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Goldsmith’s experience reminded me of a passage in Simon Reynolds’s Retromania.<\/em>\u00a0Reynolds describes<\/a> what happened after he got his first iPod and started experimenting\u00a0with\u00a0the Shuffle function:<\/p>\n

Shuffle offered a reprieve from the problem of choice. Like everybody, at first I was captivated by it and, like everybody, had all those experiences with mysterious recurrences of artists and uncanny sequencings. The downside of shuffle soon revealed itself, though. I became fascinated with the mechanism itself, and soon was always wanting to know what was coming up next. It was irresistible to click onto the next random selection.\u00a0… Soon I was listening to just the first fifteen seconds of every track; then, not listening at all. … Really, the logical culmination would have been for me to remove the headphones and just look at the track display.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

What is\u00a0the great innovation of SoundCloud, the popular music-streaming service? It\u00a0has little to do with music and everything to do with\u00a0the\u00a0visual enrichment of the track display:<\/p>\n

\"Screen-Shot-2012-11-29-at-17.37.32\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Who needs to listen to the song when one can watch the song\u00a0unspool colorfully on the screen through all its sonic peaks and valleys, triggering the display of\u00a0comments as it goes? Whatever lies on the other side of the interface\u00a0seems less and less consequential.\u00a0The interface is the thing. The interface is the content.<\/p>\n

Abundance breeds boredom. When there’s no end of choices, each choice feels disappointing. Listening to or watching one thing means you’re not listening to or watching all the other things you might be listening to or watching. Reynolds quotes a telling line from Karla Starr’s 2008 article “When Every Song Ever Recorded Fits on Your MP3 Player, Will You Listen to Any of Them?”\u00a0Confessed<\/a> Starr: “I find myself getting bored even in the middle of songs simply because I can<\/em>.”<\/p>\n

And so, bored by the content, bored by the art, bored by the experience, we become obsessed with the interface. We seek to master\u00a0the mechanism’s intricate, fascinating\u00a0functions: downloading and uploading, archiving and cataloging, monitoring readouts, watching time counts, streaming and pausing and skipping, clicking buttons\u00a0marked\u00a0with\u00a0hearts or\u00a0uplifted thumbs. We become culture’s technicians. We become bureaucrats of experience.<\/p>\n

Managing the\u00a0complexities\u00a0of the interface provides an\u00a0illusion of agency while\u00a0alleviating the agony\u00a0of choice. In the end, as Reynolds puts it, fiddling with the mechanism\u00a0“relieves you of the burden of desire itself” \u2014 a burden that grows ever more burdensome as options proliferate. And so you find that you’re no longer a music fan; you’re a jukebox aficionado.<\/p>\n

As the manufacturers\u00a0of digital slot machines have discovered, a well-designed interface induces\u00a0obsession. It’s not the winnings, or the\u00a0losses, that keep the players feeding money into the slots;\u00a0it’s the joy of operating a highly responsive\u00a0machine. In her book Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas<\/em>, Natasha Dow Sch\u00fcll tells<\/a> of meeting a video-poker player named Mollie in a casino:<\/p>\n

When I ask Mollie if she is hoping for a big win, she gives a short laugh and a dismissive wave of her hand. … “Today when I win \u2014 and I do win, from time to time \u2014 I just put it back in the machines. The thing people never understand is that I’m not playing to win<\/em><\/span>.”<\/p>\n

Why, then, does she play? \u201cTo keep playing \u2014 to stay in that machine zone where nothing else matters.\u201d<\/p>\n

I ask Mollie to describe the machine zone. She looks out the window at the colorful movement of lights, her fingers playing on the tabletop between us. \u201cIt\u2019s like being in the eye of a storm, is how I\u2019d describe it. Your vision is clear on the machine in front of you but the whole world is spinning around you, and you can\u2019t really hear anything. You aren\u2019t really there \u2014 you\u2019re with the machine and that\u2019s all you\u2019re with.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In a world dense with stuff, a captivating\u00a0interface is the perfect consumer good. It packages\u00a0the very act of consumption as a product. We consume our consuming.<\/p>\n

The machine zone is where we spend much of our time these days. It\u00a0extends well beyond the traditional\u00a0diversions\u00a0of\u00a0media and entertainment and gaming. The machine zone\u00a0surrounds us. You go for a walk, and you find that what inspires you is not the scenery or the fresh air or the physical pleasure of the exercise, but rather the mounting\u00a0step count on your smartphone’s exercise app. “If I\u00a0go just a little farther,”\u00a0you tell yourself, glancing yet again at the screen,\u00a0“the app\u00a0will reward\u00a0me\u00a0with a badge.” The mechanism is more than beguiling. The mechanism\u00a0knows you, and it cares about you. You give it your attention, and it tells you\u00a0that your attention has not been wasted.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It still feels a little shameful to admit to the fact, but what engages us more and more is not the content but the mechanism.\u00a0Kenneth Goldsmith, in a Los Angeles Review of Books essay,\u00a0writes\u00a0of a\u00a0recent day when\u00a0he felt an urge\u00a0to listen to some music\u00a0by\u00a0the American composer Morton Feldman: I dug into my MP3 drive, found […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6313","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-media-takes-command"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6313","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6313"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6313\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6382,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6313\/revisions\/6382"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6313"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6313"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6313"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}